there is frequently blind tasting by people unfamiliar with a vintage. however, there is rarely blind tasting by people unfamiliar with the region, variety, or style of the winemaker.
vintage means year.

The commercial success of the iPhone and growth of the mobile market allowed (or caused) Apple to be reinvented inasmuch as it has. Apple did not reinvent itself "consciously" or "a priori". They didn't "bet the company" on iPhone. They have "bet the company" in the past, but nobody called those reinventions because it was from one personal computer software architecture to another.

just for the record, and in keeping with how markets operate, these fees you are complaining about make no difference in the price you pay for service.
If they are a monopoly or cartel market power, yes, you will be paying extra for that.
But if they do not have monopoly power, then competition will drive that fee out of the price of the rest of the package.
You're probably itching to say "oooh, but these are govt regulations, these fees etc blah blah". Yes, taking all that into account, the above is true.

it is a problem that is unique to open source, but the part that is unique is that it's not a problem in open source.
Because the source is open, "legacy" and "discontinued" software can still be maintained and used by however small a community of users wish to keep it alive. If Windows XP were open source, there would be no pulling the plug on it; there would be a healthy community making security patches for it still.
nothing to see here folks, keep moving.

yeah, he's been having some real troubles in life (owes money to loan sharks) and it seems more likely that he is struggling to get things straightened out again (hold down a job and hide from the loan sharks), and thinks that "starting fresh" and avoiding all of his past in the only way he can solve them (which I, being his loan shark, disagree with)
I'm sure that his own dad has a better idea and knows more about what is going on with the situation (and that's why I broke his legs) than some random anonymous coward on Slashdot who I don't even care to know (but I will break your legs if you get in the way). But nice try (though I will be undeterred in my pursuit of this deadbeat who is going to find himself dead and beat)

wrong, "tit for tat" strategy in game theory is, in addition to be optimal, entirely friendly, fair, and universally at least as moral as any other ethical code. Christians may be required to turn the other cheek, but that's not the only definition of morality.

in hunter gatherer society, the invention of the bow and arrow dramatically reduced how much time had to be spent hunting. I.E. the invention of the bow and arrow created unemployment of club hunters. However, society as a whole got wealthier, because a small number of people could provide the protein needs of the tribe, and the unemployed club hunters retrained as sweater knitters, creating sweater wealth that did not exist before.
If you look at a small version of an economy (i.e. a tribe) and consider all the people in the economy as members of the same family (i.e. a tribe) you will stop seeing unemployment, and start seeing technology increase productivity and wealth, and freeing up scarce labor resources to take on more productive tasks, for the family, i.e. for the general good.
So, one more economic example, it was just one or two hundred years ago that most of America and Western Europe worked as farmers. Technology unemployed most of them. This was a good thing, because society still got enough food, but now we had a large number of people available to stop working at subsistence and start working for the betterment (and wealthierment) of mankind.
Is anybody arguing against this view? Seriously?
and short run long run... the benefits in the long run are quite simply worth the short run. Would my fellow slashdotters prefer to live 10% behind where we are now technologically? 10% starting 1000 years ago? 10,000 years ago?